


the color of blood

by villhag



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, oksana1 failed angst writer, post-2x08, sad and then less sad, this is my approximation of a s3 rewrite, ultimately hurt/comfort because hurt/comfort is my lifeblood
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:00:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28186548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villhag/pseuds/villhag
Summary: And here Villanelle was, jealous of the dead.OR: an alternative season 3 about eve and villanelle, because who cares about villanelle's mom?
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 26
Kudos: 131





	1. it begins with the color

**Author's Note:**

> A hypothesis: killing Mother was not what changed things. That's just a tidier story to tell than the real one.

Eve is dead, and Villanelle’s mind is a hellmouth ― 

Open raw, demons curling around the crevices.

The monsters that fill her head brand themselves _thoughts_. They are not so much _hers_ as they just _are_. Thoughts about what she sees ― red, violent red, then rain, a deluge, water spilling on silver stone, soggy sidewalks. Water on Eve, hugging the sleeves of her sweater, dripping down jeans, water on fabric, water on blood. Water _and_ blood, intermingingly; a violent, unsightly chemistry. 

Water and blood, repellants down to the very molecule; Eve and Villanelle, much the same. There is a metaphor to be made there, but Eve is dead. Villanelle shot her. There is no more grand romance to be made from a group of bloodied limbs. 

She stares at Eve’s lifeless body. Presumes it lifeless, at least. Pronounces it dead of her own volition. She stares at it and feels _nothing_. An abundance of it. So deep and so heavy that it might crack bones and rip sinew. Nothing in the same way that the universe was nothing, briefly, before creation. Nothing in the same way that a Picasso, a Dali, a Rembrandt, can become nothing, too, if you shred it into small enough pieces and stow it in dark enough corners.

In the Roman ruins, birds chirp. A bluejay and a robin, blue and red like a forming bruise. Villanelle decides that their melody is much worse than an accompaniment of ravens. These bird songs do not mark graves. It is all wrong, very wrong. A play gone off script. This is not what Villanelle wanted. This is not what _Eve_ wanted. A bullet between them still.

Villanelle thinks she sees Eve’s throat wobble. Demons thread heavy hands over her eyeballs but between their webbed fingers she still _sees_ , sees a semblance of life, a shot in the dark like fingers tracing over a lightswitch in a pitch-black hallway. It is there, it is _there_ , but then the monster shuts tight the curtains. Villanelle swivels on her heel. 

Of all the thoughts and the not-thoughts that stir alive in the aftermath, it is the demon of _rationality_ that digs its heels in first. 

If survival is rational, and one must be selfish to survive―

Then what is more human than a bullet through the back?

  
  
  
  


She makes a promise to herself that she will not think of her.

After all, it is useless. _Irrational_. Mourning is denial cloaked in allegory. 

Eve is dead. Eve is dead. Eve is dead and buried, or dead and rotting. Dead all the same. Dead at her hands, dead by the bullet shot straight from the ache in Villanelle’s gut to the ache in Eve’s. Dead dead _dead_. A finality, a cashed check. Killing Eve was like undoing shackles; she was rich now, rich in the truest sense: free.

This is what she tells herself. They are pretty lies. 

  
  
  
  


Eleven days after Eve’s death, Villanelle allows herself a funeral.

She buys three red roses and cuts off their heads. She puts the green stems in a thin glass vase, pours in ice water. She permits herself a bout of metaphor. Maybe a borrowed line of Emily Dickinson. A page out of Dickens.

She stares at the stems and expects her head to fill. No poetry emerges. She wants nothing more than to approach an approximation of _closure_ ; it is what Google and God have both prescribed―there is love, there is pain, and then there is, apparently, expectantly, closure. It is the scar tissue. It is how you know you are healing. 

Villanelle frowns at the vase. Her mind still feels like an open wound.

She finds, unpleasantly, that she _misses_.

She thinks of the way her fingers grazed over Eve’s for that one moment in Rome. The passing of an axe, the great equalizer; from killer to nascent killer. How Eve’s eyes darted to their hands as if wood had just struck fire; as if a hundred matches, accumulated lazily over days and months, had just come alight. She misses the way that Eve was constantly _alarmed_. Watchful. Tired. She misses the bags under her eyes; her quick hurried footsteps; her hair, permanently windblown.

She misses their avoidant conversations. She misses the way they could talk around nothing and everything and be on the same page all the same. She misses the thread of genuine connection between them, the sincerity that felt as foreign in her body as a virus. She misses feeling understood, in a way; no matter the misguided intentions, ignorant of the consequences.

She does _not_ miss the wanting; the terminal, incurable wanting. 

But you cannot miss something unless it has gone.

And it has not; it has stayed, grown in size and in scope; it is this wanting that is the bone-crushing leftovers of Eve’s death. The wanting that was deforming Villanelle now, rotting her inside and out. The wanting that was once love, poisoned consequently by rejection―the rejection that she had attempted to end naively with a bullet. 

But there was no great wave of relief in the ending. In the ending of _Eve_. Perhaps because there was never an ending at all, not for Villanelle. Not for the living. 

Only for Eve. For Eve, her life really did end as a love story. 

And here Villanelle was, jealous of the dead. 

There, _that_ is the poetry Eve gets. Deserves.

Villanelle killed her, but she still can’t have her. Eve won, in the end.

Villanelle almost smiles.

  
  
  
  
  


She pulls the knife out of the man’s limp back and grimaces.

It is not the display, the organs or gore; it’s the color.

She no longer likes the color of blood.

It begins with the color, at least. And she supposes that this is what the doctors may call _trauma_ , because her mind flashes back every time. Killing is no longer the poetic justice she once felt it to be. She feels like a retired artist on a sell-out book tour, a disembodied hand autographing pages and posing for photographs. Nothing behind the eyes. Theirs _or_ hers. Nothing nothing nothing _numb_. Murder used to feel like playing dress up. Now it feels like a marriage at its wits end.

She drops the knife to the ground and it clatters. Faintly, she hears police sirens blare.

She finds that she does not care to run. The flee instinct is feeble at most, a low, staticky radio. A gentle hum. Run to what? Run to where? Run to _who?_

She watches her victim. Surveils for a sign of life. Hopes to find one, strangely. Naively. A tremble of fingers. A blink of eyelashes. Maybe the knife was not sharp enough, maybe he is just playing dead. Waiting for her to leave and then go on his merryway, stitch up a mess of organs and return to his life as a shitty waiter. Serving shitty clams and lobsters and cheeseburgers.

That would be nice.

But he does not blink; he oozes blood, rutty red, wet and a _reminder_.

So she leaves through the backdoor.

  
  
  
  
  


The stems are wilting. Looking greyer than green, more grotesque than alive.

Villanelle unlatches her window and dangles the vase over the side of it. She considers letting it slip out of her fingers; having it fall ungracefully until it shatters on the ground. Or, better yet, someone’s head.

She refrains. Feels a powerful, sudden distaste at the idea. Oddly, she feels nauseous, pulls the vase tightly back to her chest, grips it in a chokehold and gasps for breath.

She closes the window, snaps it shut. She is tired of killing pretty things.

  
  
  
  
  


Villanelle never thought herself a _murderer_ until Rome.

Murderers are thoughtless. Murderers are tasteless. Murderers kill without reason, without ambition, no flare or solid footing; they shoot their family over Christmas dinner. They stab their wife because she undercooked the turkey. 

For nine years, Villanelle had a job to do. A _job_. She had performance reviews and meetings with bosses; adversaries and acquaintances. She climbed the ladder, dragged a dagger through skin and bone all the way to the top. She did it gorgeously. An objective fact.

But Eve had not been work. Unpleasantly, unwillingly, she had been the opposite.

A bullet through the back all the same.

Villanelle stares at her reflection and sees nothing there. Okay, not nothing― _something_ , but it is unrecognizable. She cannot put words to it. Her face has betrayed her, morphed into a limping, uncontrollable thing. Dark circles underline her eyes. Cheeks hot, rotten with blush. She bites down on her lip to the point of bleeding, but no blood escapes. Just pale, raw flesh.

Her mind returns to a whisper she had heard once.

 _The ghost with no face._

A shitty title, a worse prophecy, but here it was, realized nonetheless.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“You look… unhealthy.”

Villanelle laughs, but it is uneven. Staccato. Unpracticed. She closes her mouth, wills the sound back to the trenches.

“I am very healthy,” she teases, bites into the crust of her pizza, “in _tip top shape_.”

Konstantin runs his weary eyes over her. Comes to a different conclusion.

“You are still thinking about her?”

Villanelle stops chewing.

“Do not talk about her.”

Konstantin rolls his eyes, pushes the pizza box to the side so they are closer, eye-to-eye. 

“About who, Eve?”

Villanelle grabs him by the collar of his shirt, fists the fabric so her hand rests gently over his pulse. Feels it heighten, then lower. He is not scared. A revelation: it seems, in this form―as the scorned lover, the murderer, the _ghost_ ―she is no longer scary.

“Do _not_ say her name,” she repeats, and her voice is not hard, but ragged, “do not say it ever again. Do you understand, Konstantin?”

He takes a moment, looks at her pitifully. She does not have the energy to kill him for it. Her ego is drained, utterly depleted.

“You know she is alive, right?”

The cloth unfurls. She blinks. Sees the sight again, playing again as if summoned―the color of blood, of Eve’s blood. 

“She is dead,” she says, narrowing her eyes; feels nausea build and bubble, “I killed her.”

“Yes, I know,” he says, with a dismissive wave of his hand, “but she is stubborn.”

  
  
  
  



	2. the aftermath of eve polastri

The sequence of events afterwards are film grain; untethered, spotty at best. Villanelle’s mind struggles to tie them together neatly, package memory with a shiny red bow. But, but, but ― there is something there. There is a _thought_ , and it is wholly her own:

How fast a world can go from small to large again.

  
  


_Having_ Eve looked different now, she realizes one day in mid-March.

Before the bullet, she envisioned hands and fists. A spark between them as hot as summer. She wanted Eve to exist with her and _for_ her; that was love, had to be ― to exist for someone, on their behalf, to think nothing of the moments between your next embrace and _yada yada yada_.

She smiles, drums her fingers on a thin-rimmed balcony, twenty feet up from the street.

Eve was right and she was wrong; a common, sometimes fatal occurrence. Villanelle _could_ love, but she had not _known_ love, and she doubts she is alone in that ― she knew Hallmark and tragedy and quid pro quos. She knew being abandoned and being found again. She knew romance poems, sacrifice, bloodshed, the odd, ruinous idea of _soulmates_.

What Villanelle knows now is that these pretty ideals are monsters all the same; demons in drag, high-heeled, disguised and beloved. 

How wrong she had been; how much better it was to have Eve just as everyone else did, the same as a stranger or as high up as God; to appreciate the special charity of her continued existence. A delicate, fickle thing like candlelight. To have Eve in the purest sense, to have her _alive_.

  
  
  


She rediscovers her this way, as a stranger.

She wears a dollar-store wig and holds a coffee cup to the bridge of her nose, watches Eve from behind this makeshift mask. She was wary of being in such close proximity at first ― as if her mere presence might rip stitches, unleash hell, throw Eve back into void; worse, that the timeline might snap, like a rubberband, back into place. Worse even, that Villanelle would forget what she had learned, what had changed in the period _without_ ―

Eve is looking directly at her.

Eve’s mouth drops open, slack, her eyes blink slow, then fast. Her right hand is trembling. It reaches for something in her bag. Villanelle does not need to see it to know what it is: cold and hard; black as night; loaded.

Villanelle frowns. No, no, no ― not _yet;_ not _here_.

Before the gun has escaped the purse, Villanelle closes in. Within a millisecond her hand is draped over Eve’s, pushing the device back into shrouded obscurity. 

“Don’t do that, Eve,” Villanelle whispers, voice fragile, tempered glass, “there are _people_ around.”

Eve stares at her, blank and horrified, like seeing a ghost. Villanelle frowns. Frowns because even _Eve_ can see it now, the deterioration. How deep it must have gone, how thorough and gross and obvious. Open sores, bright and red, masked by shitty poreless skin. 

Eve’s eyes flash from confusion to anger, and Villanelle is grateful, then. Grateful enough to grin. Because anger is not pity, and Eve still sees her ― somewhere, deep beneath the vines and hellish wounds; a villain, a proper _menace_ worth getting angry about.

Before Eve can do something silly like stab her with a fork, Villanelle pulls away. Walks backwards to the entrance, like a college tour guide, backwards past the door and the long glass windows. Backwards because she is not walking away from Eve, dead and bloodied, no ― backwards because she is retreading, reworking, disfiguring a bad memory; approximating _closure_ , the only way she sees how.

  
  
  
  


For a week, Villanelle thinks only of Eve’s hands.

How rough her skin felt, raw and uncared for. She knows Eve has been working as a dishwasher downtown; how her hands spend all day soaked, lathered, wrinkled raisins by 5pm. 

She thinks endlessly but she does not leave. Because the thing is Villanelle is different now, but she has not _changed_. She has merely outsmarted her demons. To leave her apartment would be a death knell; surely she would collide with Eve again, unwittingly tether their paths once more with knotted red string; slice the possibility space between them down to a sliver, cut Eve’s life down to a jail sentence. 

She had made that mistake once. It had been selfish, to want to see her one last time ― but the wanting is deep, the demons possessive, they cannot be so easily cauterized by time and physical distance. 

After all, Eve had been no normal breakup. Eve was no normal _woman_.

Villanelle sinks deeper into her comforter and sighs. Curves her fingers into polyester. She stares at the wilted stems sitting in muddy water, prays clarity will spring out of their dull green tips. Wishes she could cut them into strips, bathe them in oil, concoct a potion to free her of the desire; the desire that only builds with distance, sustains, like a feeding, over-engorged parasite ―

She flicks her eyes away from the vase, surveys the remaining space of her once-great apartment. The countertop where the vase sits is uniquely unlittered. Clothes, magazines and take-out boxes obstruct most of the floorboards. The embodiment of a life put on terminal pause.

Sticking out between wrinkled sleeves and crumpled cardigans, the cardboard surface of _Seoul Food_ is nearly ubiquitous. The room is awash in half-eaten dumplings, discarded Bulgogi. It is objectively gross, but Villanelle is objectively incapable of dealing with it.

She wonders if their dishwasher ever doubles as the delivery boy. She wonders if Eve’s footsteps have ever graced her lowly doormat. The thought sends a shiver up her spine. She tightens her grip on the covers, breathes slowly. 

It’s funny, really, how the entire space has become an artifact of Eve. A make-shift shrine. A miniature museum. What would it be called? _The Ruins_ , she supposes. No, no, it needed to be more obvious, so that no one could see the painting and miss the meaning, miss the history that culminated in this sea of faded color ―

_The Aftermath of Eve Polastri_

She laughs.

A better museum than most, she thinks. A well-preserved psychopath, a retired assassin in the flesh; wrapped in seven layers of fabric, fossilizing.

A nice place to die, Villanelle decides. Surrounded, at least in metaphor, by your favorite thing.

  
  
  
  


A month passes. Once she has properly marinated in self-discipline, Villanelle shops.

Prada first. Then Gucci. Then ―

Oh. 

  
  
  
  


She places the Bath & Body Works bag down on the pavement, a centimeter from the door. Stares at the entryway, breathes shallowly. She can see her reflection in the storm door, a vague outline of a woman. She touches the glass tentatively, solemnly, before she _remembers_ ― rescinds her hand in a flash, scrubs her fingerprints off the surface.

If this were any other version of herself, she would have waited. Watched. Looked eagerly on to see realization dawn on Eve’s face. To see disgust, hatred, maybe a sliver of lust.

But it is May now, and Villanelle knows better. She doesn’t even leave a note. She puts the bag down, crumples the receipt, tosses it in the garbage. The gift looks unassuming on Eve’s doorstep, hidden shyly behind an Amazon delivery. 

Villanelle exhales. Reminds herself that this is not the _line_. That a medium-expensive bottle of hand moisturizer will not send Eve back to the deathly hallows. That the edge of the afterlife would never be so poorly packaged.

  
  
  
  
  


Villanelle quits work, which is never easy.

Especially when your higher ups are such clingy dicks, but so is life.

Staring at their silent bodies, splayed randomly and chaotically around the grandiose living room, she laughs. They are not dead, because Villanelle is not a _murderer_. Decidedly so ― she has hung that title on the mantle to die. But, still, they are unconcious, lips swollen, bellies bruised. A real Piccaso, but nothing fatal. A few hospital visits at most. Of course, resignation is never so simple ― she expects a mean-spirited text or two, maybe a follow-up by several sets of mercenaries. 

But that is all fine and dandy. It will give her something to do, to busy herself with. It is what Eve would probably advise, you know, in the wake of Villanelle’s retirement. To find a hobby. To pick up knitting or sewing or dodging stray bullets, hands wrapped around throats, knives nearly missing arteries, the like.

She thinks of the movies she’s seen. How the dejected office workers always clean out their desks and steal something of note ― a plaque, some toiletries, the company pencil sharpener. She ponders the sight before her, rakes her eyes over the merciful massacre. 

She stalks towards the center of the room, hovers over the central desk, wide and littered with ‘missing’ people, news clippings, blurred beheadings. For eight years, this was the center of her universe. The invisible hand guiding her own. Every decision made here trickled, trickled, trickled down. Landed squarely in her lap, planted firmly in her conscience.

She pulls out her pistol from its holster.

“Don’t shoot!” a man to her left is mumbling, hand spread protectively in front of a bloodied nose, “please don’t shoot. What do you want, a raise? You can have it. Two raises. Please.”

Villanelle cocks her head towards him, annoyed by the interruption. Can’t he see she is _thinking?_ She weighs the gun in her hands, outwardly considers his proposal. 

“I do not want a raise,” she plants the gun directly to his forehead, swatting his hand away with ease. He cries out in fear. Villanelle grins.

She is not a murderer, but torture is not murder. Torture is _drama_. Even normal people enjoy the delight of starring in plays. Villanelle is, if nothing else, a prodigy of interactive theatre.

“Okay, okay, okay,” he heaves, “look, what do you want? We have everything. We own everyone, do you understand that? Do you want to fuck a superstar? We’ll have it arranged. We’ll buy you a boat. A jet. You can kill the fucking president. Fuck. You are nothing without us, Villanelle. You will have _nothing_.”

“Then why are you the one begging?” she digs the pistol in further, enjoys the way it mushes with the wrinkles on his forehead. She does not like the way the word _want_ sits so uselessly on this man’s lips, as if he knows anything of wanting ―

“What about Eve Polastri?” he seethes, spitting her name like acid, “you want her? Well, you can have her, we can ―”

Villanelle inhales, fast and furious. She blinks and the gun is through his skull. Blinks and nearly misses the gentle fracture of his forehead, skull colliding mutually with gun and granite floors. Then ― red, red, red. She is doused with the color of blood.

She inhales again, more a hiccup than a breath, and she feels the sensation of being pulled. Her chest is tight, as if a foreign hand had shoved up the center. She is fading again, she realizes. _I am fading again_ , she thinks. In a marionette-like motion, she is yanked upwards. Strings guide her legs backwards, robotic, animal-instinct.

In a fleeting moment of lucidity, she thinks again of the movies. Of taking something with you when you leave something behind. She stares at her fingers, how they curl like vines over the blood-soaked pistol. She feels sudden, overwhelming disgust, bile bubbling over.

She throws the revolver on the desk and runs.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They don’t usually knock.

This is what occurs to Villanelle much later. The delivery boys never knock. They leave the food at the door. That’s how it works these days ― _in-place pickup_ ― god forbid two people witness each other, acknowledge another person’s passing existence through life under the guise of a transaction. But, still, that was how things were. She should have seen it coming, noticed the abrupt shift in decorum;

“Food’s here,” is abruptly announced after two firm, hurried knocks. The voice is muffled, but it draws Villanelle’s attention regardless. She hadn’t heard a voice outside her own in at least two weeks. That was an estimate. She had stopped keeping time. Really, she had stopped _keeping_ ― time, up with the news, up with herself.

She considers yelling at them to just leave it there, but she knows better. Knows that she would not bother to get it. And then there would be trash in the hallway, which would turn into neighbors in the hallway, which would turn into _questions_.

“Coming,” she groans, and slides out of her comforter. She shuffles by her mirror and notes the state of the deterioration. _Critical condition_ , she thinks, observing the malnourishment highlighting her cheekbones, the limp listlessness of her once-full hair. For the first time, a new demon slinks shyly around the corner ―

Shame.

“ _Are_ you coming?” the voice repeats, dragging Villanelle out of the void. 

Villanelle opens the door slowly, eyes squinting at the onslaught of light.

And, _oh_. She imagines this is how a newborn must feel to first see the sun.

No wonder they cry so incessantly.

“Of course,” Eve says, standing in the doorway, delivery box clutched to her chest, “ _of course_ it’s you.”

Villanelle stares at Eve, lip trembling. She bites down on it, attempts to dam the oncoming wreckage. But here she _is_ , startling the same. Startling in-tact, alive. The same as before; before she died; before Villanelle killed her. And Villanelle had not killed her just _once_ , she had killed her so many times, over and over again in the interior of her skull.

She had seen Eve since then, of course; monitored her day into night, night into day, but she had touched her only once. _Took her in_ , properly, even fewer times still. She had not allowed herself to _be_ with Eve until now, occupy the same moment. Share the same breath.

 _She’s watching me_ , it strikes her, and she remembers the shame. The complete disrepair that Eve was now privy to. Not just the eye-bags and the wrinkled pajamas, but the whole of it. The wilted stems, her wilting wellbeing. 

“Eve,” she attempts to control her tone, level it, “you work at Seoul Food?”

Eve sighs, pushes past the door frame. Villanelle stops her.

“What are you doing?” Villanelle asks, feigning annoyance. She might be beyond the grave, but Eve was still vibrant, full ― Villanelle could see it, could recognize it in Eve’s rushed, purposeful footfall, the anger she still held in her tone. 

She would not ruin her twice.

Eve looks up at her, confused.

“Delivering your food?” she grits.

Villanelle tugs the bag from her hand.

“There, delivered.”

“Oh?” Eve says, incredulous, “so that’s it, then? I play delivery boy, you play satisfied customer?”

“I’m not playing anything, Eve,” Villanelle shakes her head, pushing away from Eve ― her body is too hot, too proximate ― “go on. You wouldn’t want to get fired. I have heard the job market is getting increasingly volatile.”

“Are you kidding?” Eve barks, voice raising. Villanelle winces, and Eve is startled by that, too. As if she had finally opened Pandora’s Box to find only dust cluttering its interior, “cut the shit, Villanelle. You knew I worked at Seoul Food. You’ve been ordering from us everyday for nearly half a _year_. You’ve been waiting for this.”

“I haven’t ―”

Eve pushes Villanelle’s back into the kitchen counter, the takeout box thudding to the floor. Dumplings spring onto the carpet.

“What do you want? Do you want to kill me again? Then _do it_. I am so tired, Villanelle. I am so tired. Just fucking do it,” Eve picks up a butterknife from the counter, rams it against the palm of Villanells hand, “take it. Take it! Finish the job. What are you waiting for?”

Villanelle closes her eyes. She feels her vision wane again, the memory of the gun hard against her hand. The memory of the blood seeping out of wounds. She stares at the woman in front of her and sees time collapse inwards, outwards. 

Reality is a finicky thing, with Eve. 

“I don’t want to kill you, Eve.”

“Oh, what, you got over that phase?” Eve’s face is inches from her own, fury boiling over. Her lips are chapped, and Villanelle craves to touch them. To run balm over them with her thumb, to pick up all the shattered pieces.

“Yes,” she admits, “I have.”

A silence follows, the adrenaline seeming to drain from Eve. It is then that Villanelle wishes she could have held her fury for longer, because the silence allows Eve to _see_. She watches as the other woman's eyes rake over her face, take in the decay in full.

“You ― you look,” Eve’s eyes narrow, expression turning soft. She lifts her hand to Villanelle’s cheek, cups it lightly, doctorly, like she is a package marked _fragile_.

As Eve’s fingers tread down her cheek, Villanelle feels faint. The string has snapped between them, tugged around lungs instead; she closes her eyes. She hopes that removing the sight of her will help, but she only feels her touch more acutely.

“I look what, Eve?” she breathes out, and Eve’s fingers pause.

“Like you need to eat,” the fingers pull away, and Villanelle’s eyes snap open. And Eve is right, because without the anchor of Eve’s hand, she drops, slinks down from the sink to cabinets, her back scratching hard against wood and metal.

“Villanelle, fuck,” Eve gasps, reaching out for her.

“See, this is why I ordered takeout,” Villanelle says, head ringing, pulse richoteching, somehow finding the energy to be smug, despite it all.

“I hate you,” Eve says through gritted teeth, reaching for the dumplings she dropped. Villanelle smiles. It hurts to smile, too ― her lips cracked, skin impossibly tight, but she can’t help it. 

She loves it when Eve lies.

  
  
  



End file.
